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it has been a while since I did any code, well... 2003 to be exact? so I was a little rusty this week. In any case, i have decided to look into what we call the "serverless" mode at OpenRemote.

Just a bit of background on OR. For most professional scenarios in OR you will want to use the controller, called the ORB. However one OR's product that has a lot of traction in our community is iKNX, a serverless KNX console. The console talks directly to the hardware through IP. This product alone has established our reputation in the european installer community as a defacto choice for iphone/KNX control. It is based on iphone. The reason for this success is rather simple: it is easier to install software that just involves the iphone and a gateway rather than iphone software, PC software and a gateway. The barrier to entry is low.

With the release of OR 2.0, we are looking to generalize this with all the protocols we support. As long as you have a IP gateway, we should be …

This episode of the daily show got me thinking again about the profound unfairness of our money system.

To me it is sad more than it is funny. Forget the obvious irony of their story, that the mortgage banker's association ITSELF defaulted on its own mortgage obligation while telling everyone else not to. You can choke on the irony. However, the writers at TDS don't really realize how amoral the whole money game is. I don't expect them to, they are hired for their funny bones, not their degrees in economics.

The problem is simply stated. You have taken a loan on a house. Your house has lost value. You walk away from your mortgage. It is the right financial decision to take, but is it moral.

A straightforward answer is that money is created by the banking system. If you deposit a dollar in the bank, it is really multiplied by 10 or more in loans. THIS is how money is created. Out of thin air. So when you default you are not returning money that didn't exist in …

Quantitative Easing, or QE, is a powerful monetary tool available to central agencies under fiat money systems. It is the art of "printing money" to buy assets. This creates asset inflation.

The FED has done a first round of QE in march of 08, stabilizing the markets and sparking a market rally the likes of which not seen since the great depression. The FED has recently hinted it would do QE2.

In my mind QE1 was a necessary stabilizing tool. A deflationary spiral can become entrenched and catastrophic in the sense that the system capsizes out of equilibrium (Fisher moment in economics, where decrease of asset/capital, leads to asset deflation, leads to lower asset/capital in a feedback loop). QE1 prevented these dynamics to become entrenched.

QE2 is a very different beast. At a moment of no volatility in the markets (VIX down), the FED wants to stimulate the economy by printing more money. Many commentators argue that this is pushing on a string. Namely that the econom…